Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - August 2005

A hard man is good to beat

July, 2005

Hot hot hot. And then cool cool cool. Dry dry dry, then wet wet wet. It's summertime in England, time for umbrellas and sun cream, warm sweaters and swimming costumes.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Newsthumbs

The Server Farm

July 12, I had an outage. My Megastream internet link went down. That takes down my Secure Server, the older newsthumbs, and two of my three DNS servers.

I do have fallback - one of my DNS lines is configured to act as a replacement for the Megastream, although it means that things work more slowly. Problem was, I wasn't active when it all happened, so it was several hours before I could bring the DSL into action. When I did, everything started working again, although some things were slowed (and a few things, such as the Garden Cam and the Windmill, didn't work at all).

Then, the next day, when I called to find out about the progress of fixing the problem, I discovered that my packet transit provider had reported the wrong telecoms line as faulty.

So I called British Telecom, and gave them the correct info. BT were very good, they had an engineer in action within a couple of hours. He checked out my equipment, found it was OK, so then went to the exchange. He took out the card that links to my line, blew on it, and put it back. And everything started working again.

One annoyance - I had to reconfigure the DSL to make it function as a replacement for my Megastream. That took a while. But these DSL routers cost less than $40, so what I'm going to do, is keep a spare one, already configured suitably, so all I need to do is plug it in.

Lessons from this? A) Shit still happens in 2005, B) I need to configure a third DNS server for all the sites I host. I already have that for about 90% of them, I need to make sure the rest are covered.

The outage was cleared on July 13.

July 25, Belle dropped out. I'm pretty sure it's a hard disk gone bad. Belle is one of the backup pair of servers that process newsthumbs - because it's a backup, there wasn't any impact on surfers. But I am keen to have a backup server in this role, so I brought up Vivin (one of the spares that I installed on my last trip to Watford), and now Vivin is happily doing that job. I switched power off on Belle, and I'll replace it when I next go down to Watford.

The DtV Broadcasting System

Shopping Mall

Nothing new.

Cameras

Nothing new.

Spams of the Month

I don't make these up, although the comments on the spams are mine, of course. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their contact details - go find your own spammers!

By the way, if you're using StoneColdMail (which is free to web site members) then you won't see most of these spams, they'll be delivered into your "Spam" folder.

No-one likes spam, but murdering a spammer is going too far.

hey babe, it's your girl julie ;)
Want to tell you that so far i'm having a great summer, how about you ? I went
to the beach yesteday with my friend Sara, and many people hugging and kissing
there,
which made me feel bad since I don't have that special person, you ever feel
like that ? :/ My college is over for now, but I'm working alittle as a
waitress, and I must say there are
many rude guys out there who give me bad compliments, but I'm getting used to
that ;| The weather is awsome here, can't complain there :) Anyways, my cam is
on and i'll be
home whole week, I just didn't know how to put it online, so what I did is
connected it to some network which all it needs is age verification..here's my
site, let's
meet eachother finally...
                                                                                
bye, jules :)

This is one of my favourite spams. Considered as a work of literature, it's really rather excellent. It has the tone of naive breathless enthusiasm just right, together with a wistful longing. It says nothing explicit; Julie's age has to be inferred from the fact that she's at college. She doesn't say "I'm lonely, come and fuck me", she says "I don't have that special person", with the implication that maybe you're a candidate. It's upbeat, it's fun, it's (mostly) spelled right and the grammar is (mostly) good. Julie is obviously someone rather nice.

And there's no charge, just an "age verification", which you can be quite sure means that you have to give your credit card.

Buy a new home or refinance with 1.25 % No appraisal, no income
verification,no up-front paperrwork, no points, no fees                                                                                         

1.25%, huh? I think I'll wait, it still seems to be falling. I wonder how low it will go.

 Hi,   valkyrie
                                                                                
     I have found your e-mail in the Internet and would like to offer you
partnership. In the beginning I shall be introduced. My name is Mark.
I live in Moldova. I have internet site on sale laptops and it gives
me good money.  82m

     Clients of my site pay for purchase of laptops by many ways, but the
most  convenient kind of payment is "online payment" (billing). Billing
company which gives system online payment takes 25 % from each
transaction. Billing services the most convenient for me and clients,
but  25 % of commission it is big percent.   aAK

  I asked at billing company to lower percent of commission. They
informed that process online payments from 2,5 % up to 25 % depending
on economic development of the country of the client and for residents
of my country they cannot make commission less than 25 %. If I shall
have the partner from economically advanced country, in that case the
commission will be reduced to 2,5 %. Consequently I write to you.
I offer you partnership. If you agree to be my partner that billing
company will reduce percent of commission up to 2,5 % for my site. I
offer you 12,5 % from each transaction.   7

 I love money and with our partnership I shall make more money than
made before. It is good for us together, and with our partnership you
will make a minimum 1O OOO $ monthly.  jE
  
  Our partnership will not take a lot of time also does not demand
special education because all work will be made by my side.
I think that is difficult to make any decision but please answer me
and I shall give you more detailed information. X

Now you know how they recycle the money they make from the scams where they ask you for your credit card details.

Complimentary Year Supply of Pringles 

Uh, thanks.

Sponsorships

Most of the sponsorships now are by giving women server space and bandwidth, so they can operate their web sites without having to pay these fees. There's also photoshoots, which gets some revenue into their hands, as well as the traditional direct-funding sponsorship.

I've agreed to be the major sponsor of the Valkyrie Festival in Vancouver, in September this year.

DtV Family web sites

Here's the full list of DtV family web sites

The Clubhouse

You can give a Diana the Valkyrie membership as a gift.

Sign up here for the gift that lasts and lasts

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Tre still dominates the chatroom.

On the Message Boards

Back Page

NASA got sued for $300 million over their comet mission; Russian astrologer Marina Bai cites her moral suffering as needing compensation.

Leverage your core competences!

And then, to relax, check out the Highjoy Internet Enabled Rabbit, one of their "quality sex toys that can be controlled over the Internet".

I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.

At the end of July 2005, there were about 768,000 pictures (51 gigabytes), 162 gigabytes of video, 9500 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 213 gigabytes. There's over 140 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.

To the Magic Carpet